In a new interview, Four Year Strong talks about early fan reaction to some of the music released from In Some Way, Shape Or Form. The record drops on November 8th.
Dan: We knew that some kids would be bummed. Some of my favorite bands of all time all did this. They wrote two fucking awesome records and changed it up a little bit. New Found Glory put out Coming Home, and that’s my favorite New Found Glory record. Saves The Day put out Stay What You Are, and that’s my favorite of theirs. Brand New with Deja, that’s my favorite fucking record. At the end of the day, we’re in a band and we tour, but we love to write songs. We felt trapped about writing pop-punk in a certain way. We just wanted to write a record.
Joe: All this stuff still has heavy Four Year Strong elements. It’s aggressive and still has energy.
Dan: We’d never written a mid-tempo song though, so we gave that a shot.
Has it been weird seeing the backlash?
Dan: Not really. We’re definitely a guilt pleasure for a lot of kids. I don’t know if they don’t have to feel guilty anymore, but at some point you can’t keep everybody happy. We knew that. A lot of kids don’t like change. The band that they like isn’t changing; we’re just putting out a different record. That doesn’t mean that we don’t play our old song and that our next record is going to sound like Hoobastank. We’re the same band, we just wrote twelve different songs.
Joe: Another thing I will say about the backlash is that I think it partly had to do with the fact that we brought up beforehand that it was different. “Wasting Time” on Enemy would have come nowhere close to fitting on Rise Or Die, but if we said that, people would have said it was fucking ridiculous. We should have let people make up their own minds.